CHAPTER 1

      Every year Mama has baked her a strawberry birthday cake. And for two decades now that cake has sat on the sunshine-yellow Formica counter for one week in June unsliced, the plump pink roses atop the creamy home-churned icing with powdered sugar-coated berries, beckoning another year for Patsy to return home, mocking her silence, her absence.

      * * *

      “Flannery, I just know this is the year,” Mama said in that summer of 1972.

      “How come, Mama?” Every person in Glass Ferry, Kentucky—in all of Woolson County even—for every year since 1952, knew sixty-one-year-old Jean Butler had been saying these same things until another cake went stale and got tossed into the garbage.

      “I just know it,” Mama insisted. “I can feel it somehow, in my bones, in this sweet June air. This is the year we’ll slice Patsy’s cake, all three of us.”

      Mama quieted, and Flannery emptied the box of pink birthday candles onto the table and began counting them to put on the cake. More than once, the house awakened and popped, distracting Flannery from her tally.

      Breezes pushed through the screen door, slapping at darkened halls and sneaking into dusty corners of the century-old two-story. The bones of the house groaned and creaked like tired homes do from time to time—growled low like it was pushing something away with a warning—like it knew something bad was about to slip inside and soil the sugar-dusted air.

      Flannery rubbed at the tightness building in her neck. Mama had always said houses knew things before people did—“knows things only the soul knows”—and that homes like theirs could feel things same as a dog catches the silent clamors lost to the human ear.

      “Grab the napkins, Flannery,” Mama reminded, scattering the choir of airy protests.

      Flannery shrugged off her apprehension and crossed over to the sideboard. Sloping floorboards dipped, rasping under her feet. She hadn’t been back to Glass Ferry in a year, and had mostly forgotten how different this rambling old country house sounded compared to her loud city apartment. That’s all, she presumed. Flannery never missed making it home when the elementary school dismissed her students just in time for another birthday celebration.

      Year after year the quiet of the house, the countryside, all of it, still managed to lull her into its own sleepiness until an unexpected jarring bumped the silence and jerked her back.

      She dug through the table linen drawer and handed Mama the embroidered strawberry napkins. “I need to get out of my nightgown and get dressed,” Flannery said, dusting flour off her gown.

      “Oh, baby girl, wear your prettiest. We’re going to have a big celebration,” Mama chattered, “bigger than the Independence Parade even.” She laughed as she smoothed folds into the cloth napkins and stacked them neatly beside the cake. “Hard to believe my twins are going to be thirty-six this year. Lord, how time flies. Seems like just yesterday when you and Patsy were in your cradles. You up and left for college and married—”

      “Mama . . .” Flannery warned that her divorce was not on the table for discussion.

      “Speaking of time”—Mama pointed to the old electric daisy clock hanging on the wall—“this morning is getting away from us. We haven’t even made the punch. Why don’t you start on that before you change into your dress.”

      Flannery glanced at the kitchen clock and then down at her daddy’s old windup Zenith wristwatch on her arm, finding a solace and satisfaction in her cheating. Ever since Flannery was born, she had been stealing—stealing time same as she did Patsy’s pearls back then—setting all the wall clocks and wristwatches exactly eight minutes ahead. And when Flannery visited Mama every year for the fake birthday celebration, she’d make sure to do the same to her clocks even though Mama fussed the day into tomorrow trying to break her of it. Mama always said, “It’s the devil’s doings, and it doesn’t make sense to thieve from the Lord’s hours when you’ll just have to pay ’em back.”

      But that’s not what her daddy had taught her. Nuh-uh. The very thought of that final Reckoning Day was why Flannery stayed precisely eight minutes ahead, looking over her shoulder for those lagging minutes when the devil might try to collect.

      Flannery followed Mama’s most hopeful gaze to the wall. Mama would track those circling black hands most of the day, keeping a vigilant eye on the time and the foyer too, first to move the hands back to their proper time and, second, to welcome Patsy when she burst through the door.

      Several times Mama caught Flannery looking to the foyer and gave her an optimistic grin. Instead of smiling back, Flannery turned away. She wanted to believe, but after all these years there was nothing left, just a plait of hope that had been twisted, rubbed too many times, tangled into a useless, knotted wish that would never unravel.

      Flannery knew the quiet morning would slip into a quieter afternoon, and soon the lull of evening would gather a cold, silent darkness. Tonight she would find Mama tear-stained, asleep at the kitchen table, plumb wore out from watching and waiting. Flannery would rouse her mama from the chair, take off her glasses, and convince her to go to her room—helping her to drag her aged bones and aching heart to bed until the next year—the next time Patsy’s birthday rolled around.

      Time. If only Flannery could snatch some of it back for them.

      “Flannery.” Mama pulled her to the task and pointed to Patsy’s strawberry cake. “Are you sure I can’t make you one, or maybe bake your favorite—cherry pie? It’s your birthday too, you know.”

      “I do love your cherry pie. But this’ll do, Mama.” She plucked an orange from the fruit bowl and rolled it in her hands. “Doc says no added sugar for us borderline diabetics.”

      Mama picked up